In the era of the Internet, online marketing has become a powerful tool for promoting products and services in an online market that has never existed in the paper age. In order to maximize their exposure to online users, online advertisers use various techniques. Online merchants may pay to place their products and services on the search result page to enhance their exposure at their own cost.
Another technique of online marketing utilizes a website to attract users by providing useful information. When a user visits the website, the user may be directly or indirectly provided with advertising materials. The more users visit the website, the more valuable the website becomes to the advertisers. Even better is that a new user visiting the website registers with the service of the website and provides personal information such as his/her age, residence, personal interests, etc. Such personal information may be used to provide more focused advertising to the user, therefore online advertisers usually value a registered user higher than an anonymous user.
An online referral system directs its clients to other affiliated websites and generates revenue based on the frequencies and quality of the referrals. For example, the total number of clients referred from a website to an affiliated website may be used to calculate the referral fee basis. The number of successfully registered clients as a result of referral may be valued higher than a non-registered referral. Typically, referral fees are based on a contract between the referring party and the referred party. Tracking the number of the referred clients is important to correctly calculate the referral fees.